LifeJacket

And so our drift this season comes to an end. We’ve reached the shore. We’ve stayed buoyant, surfing on the voices of the Solent, writing alive as the tide. This season’s finale features ‘Anchor’ by Eden Wright, a poetic spoken word audio drama set at the cliff edge of a non-descript coastal town, where Lyn, our protagonist, finds herself each night, mourning. Blending magic-realism and a coastal-...

New year, new voices. This week's episode of LifeJacket features young poets from ArtfulScribe's Wessex Schools annual poetry slam, radiant young writers expressing themselves in lyrical slam poetics, surprising allegories, daftly poignant soliloquies and moving anecdotes. You’ll hear poems from the 2024 cohort, students of Applemore College, New Forest Academy, Hounsdown School and The Romsey Sch...

How is our lifejacket holding up? From what crude materials did I compose its sleeveless visage? Through life’s shrapnel and stray pebbles, brackish currents and brutal rapids, it has seen better days. A crude yet crafted thing. The poem is such a thing, too. Both a crude, yet crafted thing. The poem, a composite of those simple stray truths and experiences, yet honed and crafted into a structure,...

This episode of LifeJacket concerns the desires of poets, clearly catalysed by experiences and lyrical dreams. We’ll hear from Harley Truslove as they navigate their intimate relationship with the moon, as all poets are wont. Claire Griffin stokes the fire one feels in the gut when they are homeward bound. And Claire Hillier interrogates the visages and visions of a woman burned to the ground, to...

Episode 4: Relearning My Name The name is the story. In this LifeJacket special, two young writers navigate systemic and social issues in an expression of solidarity, hope and future-making. Relearning My Name is an audio docu-drama which combines dramatic monologue with real interview extracts to show the racial prejudices faced by students of South Asian descent in the UK school system. Written...

The writer sometimes doubles as a psychogeographer, imbuing place with human behaviour, nature and emotion - or the reverse, imbuing the human with the elements of a place. This week’s episode of LifeJacket plays two pieces from Angela Chicken and Issa Loyaan Farrah-Kelly, and strafes processes/practices such as ‘inscaping’, to borrow the term from Gerard Manley Hopkins and ‘zoning’ from Wanda Col...

Poets and writers often find themselves navigating the perimeter. You face the physical perimeter of a line or paragraph end. You skirt the boundary of the idea trying to find the right way in. Pause at the perimeter of your drift, feel the ebb of the moment, seize a gap in your day and examine what happens inside the lines with poems by Liz Amos, Craig Chalmers and Jo Fisher in this week’s LifeJa...

As we wade in the waters, we find ourselves stepping across time - the past, present and future flows through language. A poem from further up the river remains in these currents and in our listening, remakes our understanding of language, ourselves, time. In this episode of LifeJacket, we hear the poems of Concha Méndez, whose poems, in the words of poet and translator Harriett Truscott, shift fr...